Mac Miller’s posthumous album is a wonderful, if unsettling, reminder of a talent lost
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Unlike your typical bucket-scraping rattlebag of audio oddities thrown together to con extra cash from grieving fans, this record feels complete and cohesive. Posthumous albums often seem to have goosebumps engineered into the mix. Balloonerism – the second Mac Miller record to be released since his death, aged 26, in 2018 – feels spookier than most. It comes billowing out of the speakers on strange, loose scattered clouds of woozy reverb, jazzy keyboards and trippy percussion. Snatches of studio banter crackle through the static like dreams and memories; Miller’s voice coils softly around notions of death like smoke rings.
“F*** the future … What does death feel like?/ I wonder what death feels like?” he queries on the penultimate track “Rick’s Piano”. The echoing bar room keys belong to revered producer Rick Rubin, who worked with Miller on his 2018 album Swimming and also supported him in his attempts at sobriety. According to the Mac Miller estate, though, the material on Balloonerism was created as a full-length album around the time he released Faces in 2014. It was a project “of great importance” to him, the estate says, even as other projects ultimately took centre stage.
Balloonerism certainly feels complete and cohesive, unlike your typical bucket-scraping rattlebag of audio oddities thrown together to con extra cash from grieving fans. But it’s also weirdly spacious. Much of its power comes from the deep pocket in the record’s percussion. It opens with a desert-swept jingle of tambourine, maraca and distant skimming of drum skins before a tensely tapped hi-hat leads us into “Do You Have a Destination”, which immerses listeners in a woozy-soul bath of a groove.
